When you've done it all, the instinct is to put all of it on the resume. Don't. Pick one leading competency, let the other work become supporting narrative.

The silence between callbacks isn't a verdict. The job search is asking you to outsource your self-worth and then punishing you for doing it. Move the inbox off your phone. Audit once. Fill the cup somewhere else.

This week's read: Ruben Hassid on how to use your personal AI at work without getting fired.

This is the catch-all trap, and I see it almost every day in the resumes I read. When you've done a lot, the instinct is to show all of it equally, like the resume is a record of your career.

It isn't.

It's a claim about what you do best, particularly over the last 7-10 years. And when every function gets equal billing, the recruiter scanning your resume for seven seconds doesn't see a senior leader with range. She sees a generalist. The work didn't fail. The framing did.

The fix is to pick a leading competency and let everything else become supporting actors that make the leading claim stronger. Your range stays on the page, but it stops competing with itself for the same job.

Here's what that actually looks like.

The before. The catch-all version of one role.

Read it back. Every bullet is technically true. HR, ops, comms, change management, they're all there, all in line, all asking for equal weight. Which is why the recruiter walks away thinking: she does a little of everything, but does she have depth in any of it?

The after. People Ops as the leading narrative. Everything else in service of it.

What changed, and why.

The lead claim got room to breathe. The strongest People Ops outcomes are now the first thing the recruiter sees. No setup, no scaffolding, no list of adjacent functions. The numbers stand on their own, which is what lets them actually land.

Cross-functional partnership became proof, not a separate bullet. The work she did with IT, with Ops, with finance didn't disappear. It moved inside the bullets that were already doing People Ops work, where it does its real job: showing she can run programs across functions.

The comms work got reframed as the version a People Ops leader is hired to do. Internal communications isn't a separate function on this resume. It's change communications during a leadership transition, which is exactly what a senior People Ops role owns.

The ops work became enablement. The 140 managers and the engagement lift aren't "operational efficiency" anymore. They're manager enablement, which is the language of the lane she's claiming. The skill is the same. The framing tells the recruiter what category to put it in.

The supporting work (comms, ops, change, partnership) does what supporting work is supposed to do. It makes the lead more credible.

Pick the door you actually want to walk through.

The catch-all resume is trying to keep every door open at once by giving every function equal weight, which is the same thing as not picking.

Pick the door. Write the leading claim for that door. The other work stays on the page, but it stops competing for the lead. It does what supporting work does: it makes the lead stronger.

The gumption. Coaching Club is Live and we still have a few more seats left! I’d love to see you there.

I was on an intro call with a new client last week and she said something that's been sitting with me ever since. "I only feel decent about myself if someone calls. Otherwise, I'm so down I can't see the next step."

Ugh.

And I think a lot of you are sitting with the same thing right now. The total vulnerability of the job search. The way you've put all your hope into the chance that someone, anyone, will respond to the application you sent. The validation when they call. The total spiral when they don't.

It feels like the trenches of dating and it has a lot of people down BAD.

You wrote the best version of yourself and sent her out into the world, but now you're waiting to see if anyone wants her. Eventually start to wonder if it's you.

The way you spent 3 hours customizing your resume.

The way one callback turns the whole week around and one week of silence makes you question everything.

So before we talk about what to do, let's name what's actually happening.

The job search asks you to outsource your self-worth, and then punishes you for doing it.
You can't apply for jobs without believing you're qualified. You can't get through a week of silence without believing you're not. The system asks for confidence on the way in and erodes it on the way through. This isn't a flaw in you. It's a flaw in the system, and you happen to be inside it right now.

A callback is more than a meeting. It's a signal that you exist the way you think you exist.
When the callbacks stop, the signal stops. And capable women start questioning themselves in ways they would never tolerate from anyone else. Because the only feedback the search gives you is presence or absence, and absence reads as a verdict, even when it isn't one.

Most silence isn't about you.
Twenty years in HR and I can tell you it’s rarely about you.

Here's what's actually going on when you don't hear back:

None of these are about you, even though all of them feel like they are.

The fix is to take some of the weight off.

Here's what I told my client, and what I'll tell you.

→ Move the inbox off your phone's home screen. Open it twice a day. The other twenty-two hours, it doesn't exist. Refreshing eight times a day is picking at a bruise that just keeps hurting.

→ Audit your resume one time, and then stop. Ask if it's the strongest claim you can make about your work. If yes, close the document. If no, sharpen it. Then close the document. You don’t need to keep editing, tweaking, changing. You need data to see how your resume performs over time to tell what works (or doesn’t work) with which audiences to make intentional change.

→ Fill the cup somewhere else. The job search will not give you back what it's taking. You need other places to feel like a person. Friends. Walks. The thing you make. The dog. Something that reminds you that the inbox doesn't get to decide who you are.

→ Tell someone. Out loud. The silence gets louder when you keep it secret. Tell a friend. Tell your therapist. Tell me.

The silence ends. It always does, although it isn’t usually on our timing.

There is SO MUCH advice out there on how to use AI. Certifications, webinars, coaching, money grabs. In my opinion, spending money on AI training isn’t the best use of your resources right now because it’s constantly changing.

If you buy an AI certificate today, in six months many of the pillars have shifted and your certification loses its appeal.

Which is why I love reading Ruben Hassid’s Substack. It’s free and packed full of simple ways to start to incorporate AI into your work.

This week’s article stood out to me because we don’t talk enough about using AI responsibly at work. Your CEO is probably funneling proprietary info into Claude right now and calling it innovation.

Regardless, protect yourself first. This is a new area in employment law and it hasn’t been tested yet, but it will. Companies will eventually get dinged with major privacy violations, proprietary info will be sold to competitors, and they will eventually look to place blame.

Don’t be the one who takes the hit because you used a tool that made work easier. Get in front of responsible use and protect yourself.

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